Certainly, the animals, especially when they are young and developing, like to chew on objects, and may choose to hang out in the warmth under a car. Wildlife expert John Bryant has confirmed that foxes may well have gnawed through the cables in Kent. The story hasn’t tipped into complete fantasy, yet: previously reports have suggested marauding gangs of young vulpine louts were actually “addicted” to brake fluid.

This hooligan urban fox is a common character in the British media. If one animal is anthropomorphised more than any other in Britain, it is the fox – and its urban variety is often a target for a peculiar mixture of hatred, fear and myth. A fox that “trapped” a group of people in a social club in Alconbury, Cambridgeshire, in 2015 was described in news reports using colourful terms that suggested the fox was displaying behaviours outside its wild nature. “Psycho”, “vicious”, “marauding”, “aggressive”, “rampaging”, “angry” were some of the surprisingly unscientific words used. But this was by no means a one-off incident.

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Occasionally it is comic. In 2013, a Kent newspaper told of the “fox horror” of a man who had a foxy intruder when he was sat on the toilet. “It was like a struggle for my life,” he said. Often, however, there are sinister undertones with no basis in reality that serve to whip up fear.

The way we talk about foxes and other predators is deeply embedded in our cultural history. Take the idea of the fox going on an American Psycho-esque killing spree in the henhouse, murdering chickens to sate its sadistic appetites. This idea is still repeated even though it sounds like something from the middle ages. It is literally from the medieval times, as we can see in ecclesiastical art, with depictions of Reynard the Fox and other folkloric tales. In fact, the fox is engaging in a normal carnivorous behaviour called “surplus killing” and it doesn’t kill “for fun”, because “fun” doesn’t come into it. It just wants to find food – and will cache the chickens for later. “Foxes are getting bigger and more deadly” shrieks another headline. But there’s no evidence that they are ballooning, either.

One might expect that in a more enlightened, conscious and environmentally aware age, we would have evolved past demonising the fox and dressing it up with myths and fiction. Writing that a mother “fears that the fox was about to sink its razor-sharp teeth into her son’s head as he slept” might accelerate the drama of the episode and sell more papers, but a calmer, more factual approach – including mention of fox deterrents, or the reasons why these incidents are happening – will make for a more ecologically literate society. Such incidents lead to calls for a cull from politicians and commentators, who may not realise that foxes regulate their own populations and if one fox is taken out, another will take its place.

‘It is possible that mythmaking and scaremongering around the fox may still exist because it is our last, great predator.’ Photograph: Alamy

So why do we continue to vilify these poor creatures? Simply speaking, the interests of the fox and the human collide. From the gamekeeper who wants to keep his poults safe from the weekly shoot to the homeowner irritated by the noise and fouling in their garden; the farmer who wants to protect his chickens to the neighbour who thinks a local fox is ransacking his bins (it may well be a cat). While the urban issues are relatively new, appearing when foxes colonised our cities and towns after the second world war, the fox as a “cunning” predator is historical.

It is possible that mythmaking and scaremongering around the fox may still exist because it is our last, great predator. We wiped out the wolf, the bear, the lynx and many other carnivores, and the fox is one of the largest that remains – certainly the animal that is seen most regularly. Is there an innate need in us to be frightened of the final beast in the woods, some genetic hangover from our hunter-gatherer ancestors?

Perhaps these stories also speak to a disconnect from the natural world. The attitude that we are abiotic, that we stand apart from other living organisms, that we must have dominion over the earth and exploit it for our needs, is seen in contemporary intolerance to the fox, even though the species is far from going extinct. We need to question myths and rumours about the fox and instead celebrate the brilliantly adaptable, beautiful and highly evolved wild animal that it is.